And pukes! Literally! Here’s the story—in 1970 Columbia Records head honcho Clive Davis, eager to resuscitate Tony Bennett’s faltering career by updating his sound, browbeat Bennett into singing the songs of The Beatles, Stevie Wonder, Peggy Lee, Dusty Springfield, Richard Harris and the like—you know, freaky countercultural stuff, one small step away from Wild Man Fischer.
And Tony—a 100-percent Great American Songbook kind of guy—did what any great singer in his shoes would do. Threw up on them. Because he was backed into a corner and Captain Beefheart covers couldn’t be far away. He later recalled: “I started planning the record by listening to as many current hits as I could stand. I mean some of the songs made me physically nauseous.” The poor dear man. George Harrison’s “Something” has that effect on people.
Nausea, as we all know, is one small step away from actually blowing chunks, and that’s exactly what Bennett did come time to record such rancid hippie fare as “Eleanor Rigby” and the druggy “Little Green Apples.” Davis himself reported that Bennett vomited at the start of the sessions. Tony, a class act in all respects, used a more polite term: “I actually regurgitated when I made that awful album.”
Bennett was hardly alone in his aversion and disgust for the sounds of the younger generation. Way back in 1957 Frank Sinatra called rock and roll “the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear.” Ol’ Blue Eyes went on to say “It is sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons,” before dismissing it as a “rancid smelling aphrodisiac” and “the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth.”
But 1957 was 1957, and Sinatra was responding to a new youth music that really did seem like a threat to everything the members of his generation held sacred. Elvis was fucking television audiences with his hips! Jerry Lee Lewis was pushing his “Big Balls of Fire” in the faces of the Greatest Generation! Things looked grim for the future of Western Civilization. It would take years, and a Glam Revolution, before David Bowie would concede that Fedora Frank had been right all along: “If [Lou Reed and I] are the spearhead of anything, we’re not necessarily the spearhead of anything good. Any society that allows people like us to become rampant is pretty well lost.”
Not every icon of an older generation has recoiled in disgust at the sound of the younger generation. Take Germany’s Heino, the very pale and frankly weird-looking schlager singer beloved by every little old lady from Frankfurt to Rostock. In 2013 Heino released the LP Mit Freundlichen Grüssen, on which he covered (with a vengeance!) songs by the likes of Rammstein, the punk band Die Ärzte, and Deutsche hip-hop heroes Die Fantastischen Vier. He didn’t puke. Rammstein let it be known that his cover of “Sonne” made THEM want to puke, but soon enough he would be performing “Sonne” with them at the metal-friendly Wachen Open Air Festival. The album rocketed to Number One on the German charts.
Bennett was no Heino. Then again, Heino is no Bennett. His shlock folk songs have never inspired anyone to call him the German Sinatra, and he had little to lose, although I suspect more than one of his geriatric fans keeled over dead the moment they saw the album cover (Heino looking tough in punk garb). Bennett had a respected reputation (and a Caddy trunk filled with Grammy Awards) to uphold, and he wanted to protect that reputation. And now he was being asked to perform “Little Green Apples”?
The chief downfall of Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today! is song selection. Nowhere have I read that Tony had no choice in the songs he was being asked to sing. Indeed, that “I started planning the record by listening to as many current hits as I could stand” gives the clear impression that he could have sung what he wanted. I could be wrong, but I don’t think Clive Davis pressed a gun to his head and forced him to sing “Eleanor Rigby.” He might have chosen other songs, is what I think, and if I’m wrong please let me know it.
The point I’m trying to make is that there were dozens of songs Bennett might have put his stamp on without hitting the toilet, which tells me that either the guy had a bad picker or more likely was simply tone deaf when it came to any song written after 1948. As it is, there are songs on Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today! that are unimpeachable. The album regularly makes Worst Ever lists, but it’s not because of songs like George Harrison’s “Something,” Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour,” the Johnny Mathis number “Live for Life,” or Dusty Springfield’s (by way of Burt Bacharach and Hal David) “The Look of Love.”
They may not have been tailor made for a singer like Bennett, but there’s no reason he couldn’t have put his stamp on them. And it’s not as if Davis pressed him into singing them with rock instrumentation, or frog-marched him into a studio with Canned Heat, or Blood, Sweat & Tears even. Almost all of them are heavily orchestrated, old school style—which is part of the problem.
No, the album owes its status as a real stinker to songs like the country pop number “Little Green Apples.” Bennett shouldn’t have gotten within a country mile of the song, and he obviously knew it. His interpretation, jazzy and replete with horns, is what you’d expect. And there’s worse, much worse. His decision to talk his way through (when he should have been talking his way out of) “Eleanor Rigby” was disastrous—there’s a reason it’s the one people always single out when they put Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today! on their “worst of” lists.
The same goes the wonderfully cynical Peggy Lee classic “Is That All There Is?” You get more talk, and the talk is hilarious. Cynical and disillusioned aren’t words in Bennett’s vocabulary, and listening to him talk about watching the family house burn down as a kid (in his underwear, no less) and then asking “Is that all there is to a fire?” is, well, enough to make you understand why the poor guy blew chunks.
“MacArthur Park” was an interesting and unfortunate choice. The song is pure melodrama, the lyrics are almost surreally bad, and Richard Harris’campy thespian-on-steroids delivery makes it a classic of brilliant shlock. Bennett probably thought he was solving the problem—and it is a solution of sorts—by starting the song in media res, thereby eliminating all the great stuff about love’s hot fevered iron and the striped pair of pants and even the cake left out in the rain, but without the sweet green icing what’s left?
Tony’s take on The Beatles’ “Here, There and Everywhere” is nothing special and raises the interesting question—why not “Yesterday”? It’s no disgrace, but Bennett doesn’t sound comfortable singing it, which goes for every other song on the album. His ending: “Everywhere!” (Pause) “There!” borders on the ridiculous, and listening to it you realize that the biggest problem with the album, aside from some questionable song choices, is the arrangements.
Which you can chalk up to Peter Matz, who was no hack, but an Emmy and Grammy Award winner who’d worked with the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Noël Coward and, most pertinently Barbra Streisand. Davis had similarly pushed Streisand to record more contemporary music, Matz had arranged some of it, and it had flopped. But Davis had a vision, even if Matz seemed to have no idea as to how to help him realize it, and Tony’s album went the same way as Streisand’s.
The arrangements on Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today! are the sound of yesterday and on these songs the arrangements of yesterday do no favors to the songs of today. He takes the lovely simplicity of a song like “Something” and complicates it, drowns “My Cherie Amour” in strings and more strings, and throws roadblocks in the way of Bennett simply expressing himself every chance he gets. Tony never stood a chance with “Little Green Apples,” but the jazzy and relatively stripped-down arrangement (the only one by someone other than Matz) was a move in the right direction. This could be why it’s the only song on which Bennett lets loose like he has something to prove. The arrangement gives him room to breathe.
The album has its inexplicable moments. Why does Bennett talk his way through “Eleanor Rigby”? Similarly, why does he adopt a heavy New Yawk accent when he says things like “keeps in a jah by the dowah” when his diction is impeccable elsewhere on the album? I’ve heard his performance on the song compared to a guy reciting classic English poetry. To me he sounds like a guy auditioning for a role in West Side Story.
Tony Bennett didn’t have a transvestite hooker’s chance of becoming Pope on this album, but he wouldn’t have become a laughingstock if he’d picked better songs and stripped down the arrangements (perhaps by barring Matz from the studio). Nobody’s going to convince me there weren’t contemporary pop songs out there—songs that have subsequently become standards of their own—that he couldn’t have made work if he’d hit them head on and without all the distracting orchestral padding.
But Bennett’s real problem had to do with his ears—when it came to the songs being played on the radio, they were every bit as intolerant as those of Frank Sinatra. His prejudices deafened him. Worse, they induced a bad case of generational vertigo that in turn led to a case of nausea that was literal. This new music made him sick. Which was unfortunate, because even Sinatra would get around to singing “Something.” He would even call it “the greatest love song of the past 50 years.”
Tony was not Frank Sinatra. Not his fault, really—he knew what he liked, he knew what he did well, he knew which songs he could put on like a tux and which ones he’d wear like a cheap suit. He wore the songs on Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today! like a cheap suit and it made him ill. A better title for this baby would be Tony Sings the Great Hits of Today and Pukes! I’m sure it would have sold better.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
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